Huge asteroid set to fly past Earth tonight – here’s how to watch it

Not every week starts off with a 900m-long asteroid passing close enough to Earth you can spot it with binoculars. But this evening (Monday, January 26) asteroid 2004 BL86 will miss us by 750,000 miles as it hurtles past at 35,000mph.

It will appear to move backwards in the night sky relative to other stars

This will be the closest approach of an asteroid this size until 2027

Nasa says it poses no threat to Earth ‘for the foreseeable future’

Give it another four hours though and you’ll be able to glimpse it moving through the constellation of Hydra to the east-southeast around 8pm. It will be too faint to see with the naked eye but should be visible with a small telescope or binoculars. “Not only did asteroids provide Earth with the building blocks of life and much of its water, but in the future, they will become valuable resources for mineral ores and other vital natural resources,” said Yeomans. We won’t see another asteroid pass this close to Earth until 2027. If the sky is too cloudy to spot the asteroid – or you can’t lay hold of binoculars – you’ll be able to watch a live stream of the passing thanks to Slooh, the live online observatory.